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Thursday, June 14, 2012

That's just great. It's where the children go to research their school assignments and it's full of porn and the Wikipedia people won't put in a filter. So, be warned parents, if your children are looking at Wikipedia, you don't really know what they might be looking at!

Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger warns that one of the site’s primary uses is actually for viewing pornography, and despite the outcry for content filters, none have been implemented.

“Wikipedia really faces an existential kind of question,” Sanger told LifeSiteNews. “Do they want to be an adults-only website, or one that continues to welcome children?”

A survey of 176,000 Wikipedia readers and contributors in 2010 revealed that as many as 25% of users are under 18 years old. According to Fox News, Wikipedia is used every day by millions of children doing research for school.

So just how much porn are children viewing?

“Wikipedia features some of the most disgusting sorts of porn you can imagine,” Sanger states in a blog post on his website, “while being heavily used by children.”

According to Wikipedia traffic statistics, the majority of the site’s most frequently viewed pages are explicitly pornographic.

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comment(s):

It isn't "full" of it. I've contributed to multiple articles, and since you had "no idea" it suggests the reality that unless you actually search for sexually oriented topics you wont find it. It's dead easy to find out what your children have been looking at, you simply password protect your browser settings so that history is always available for you (or you use other software to keep records of it).

However, it is the same with the internet of course, it carries all facets of humanity and like real life, children need to be taught how to handle the diversity of it all, include that which may distress or harm. Wikipedia has a "lot" only because it is absolutely enormous, but then the internet itself is also enormous and carried more content of all kinds than anyone could get their heads around.

The only way for parents to address issues of content their children access is to be there with them when they do, and when that becomes impractical buy filtering software which will stop them searching certain words and block certain websites. They might also subscribe to ISPs that offer filtering at source.

One possible reason for the high traffic to Wikipedia media that is explicit is because this is one site that the national filters of the morally upstanding states in the Arab world and China do not block.

Bear in mind also that over half of Wikipedia usage is now non-English language portions of the site.

On the plus side, I am fairly sure Wikipedia has contributed value to hundreds of millions of people in orders of magnitude that could be valued in the billions of dollars, and it has all been done voluntarily, in a non-commercial environment, without the government. (Oh and there are numerous wikis with content that is far more disconcerting, such as the neo-fascist Metapedia).

Yeah, I don't use the Wikipedia search, so I wouldn't have had some of the explicit porn come up on unrelated searches (read the rest of the article for that bit!). And I don't search for porn, either, so have never seen Wikipedia linked to it.

"However, it is the same with the internet of course, it carries all facets of humanity and like real life, children need to be taught how to handle the diversity of it all, include that which may distress or harm. "

Society also has an obligation to protect children as well. The internet is too much of a wild west in this respect. I'd personally be quite happy to pay for a filter at the ISP level, but there seems to be quite a bit of resistance to doing that from them. It might be because there is far more support from women for this than men, and maybe a number of husbands don't want their wives to know what they get up to on the internet. The mind boggles.

I haven't used Conservapedia as it's not turned up on any of my searches. I have no idea of how good or bad it is.